When we hear about confidence games, we think, “never me.” Welcome to The Grift, a show about con artists and the lives they ruin. Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova takes us to the darker side of human nature and deceit. Ten stories about card sharks, cult leaders, art forger… read more
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Ferdinand Demara is quite possibly the greatest con artist you’ve never heard of. With good reason: he hardly ever used his own name. Demara was a …
Peter Fenton made a career out of crafting that con we’ve all fallen for: the con of fantasy, of alternative realities that are much more pleasant than the existing one. This week, we go inside the world of carnival …
A fraud is lurking on most every block of most every city and town, all over the world: the psychic. When you’re down, when you’re alone, when you’re …
Oscar Hartzell, born to humble beginnings, would go on to craft one of the most elaborate and successful mail fraud cons of all time. Pirates, lost …
Sam Israel not only ran one of the most successful Ponzi schemes in history, he would eventually go on to the single most extreme con there is: the …
Maria talks with the Atlantic’s Emily Yoffe about the most common grift of them all: the sweetheart scam. It’s a catfishing bait and switch where the person you fall in love with isn’t the person you thought. It has …
A small secretive cult was started in the 1970s and operated out of New Jersey for decades without notice. A survivor tells us her dark story of …
Cassie Chadwick was one of the most famous, or infamous, seductresses of the Gilded Age. She excelled at impersonating high society royalty—and at getting everyone in her path to shower her with cash, even though they …
The only thing Ken Perenyi loved as much as art was swindling the art world. He relished the contest of wits, the risk of getting caught, the thrill …
“Fast Jack” Farrell is one of the greatest card and dice manipulators of the twentieth century - an undisputed leader in the vast world of crooked …
Coming soon from Panoply and Maria Konnikova, The Grift: stories about con artists and the lives they ruin.
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